A politician is set to rearrange Twitter landscape in India by overtaking a Bollywood icon for the top slot.

Yes, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) has surpassed Bollywood ‘Shehansha’ Amitabh Bachhan (@SrBachchan) as the most followed person on Twitter in India.

Modi was one among the few politicians to enter Twitter in 2009. While launching the Gujarat edition of BusinessLine on May 24, 2013, he had said that social media has given voice to common people. As a political leader, he knew its power and was using it to maximise his reach.

User name change

A majority of Twitterati is familiar with @narendramodi. Modi used the handle @narendra_modi till October 13 2009. Ahmedabad-based techie Abhishek Desai had registered the twitter handle @narendramodi. After handing over the access to Modi on October 12, 2009, Desai tweeted that he had blocked the twitter id for Modi. Modi had gained 59,000 followers till October 2010. It took almost two more years for him to reach the mark of first one-million — the ninth day of Navaratri on October 23, 2012, to be precise. He was himself following around 290 users then.

The next million turned in almost after nine months in July 2013. The Twitter users Modi followed went up in tandem to 410. At 8 pm on August 10, Modi's follower count was 2,18,17,914 and Bachchan’s at 2,18,20,718, a difference of 2,804.

The number of tweets from his handle remained a few hundred from 2009-11. It crossed 1,100 and 800 during 2012 and in the first eight months of 2013, respectively. These were the days of Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat.

He used Twitter to highlight the potential of Gujarat as an investment destination both in domestic and international platforms.

A majority of his tweets would also focus on Swami Vivekananda. Khadi textiles and various schemes of the Gujarat government too found a special place in some.

On September 13, 2013, Modi was announced as the Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha election. He used the Twitter platform to promote various poll-related technology initiatives such as the launch of mobile app, crowdsourcing of the election manifesto, projection of his campaigns through 3D technology, and the famous Chai Pe Charcha series.

So much so, five months after garnering two million followers, the number crossed three million in December 2013. By then Narendra Modi was following more than 880 users on Twitter.

The next million took no more than five months to materialise during when he also tweeted the maximum using his own handle. The number of users he was following crossed 1,000, too.

Golden tweet

Modi's famous May 16, 2014 tweet — “India has won! Bharat ki vijay! Achche DinAAne wale hain !— set a new trend in the Twitter world. With more than 70,000 re-tweets, it went on to become the ‘golden tweet’ for that year in India. It has garnered an additional 14,000 re-tweets in the last two years.

As Prime Minister, his pet campaigns have been Swachch Bharat and educating girl child on Twitter also. The Prime Minister has tweeted his way to boost India’s diplomatic relations with other countries. Many a time, his foreign trips come with tweets in the languages spoken in the countries of visit.

‘Breaking news’

He breaks news on Twitter these days. One such was at 1.31 p.m. on December 25, 2015 when he tweeted: “Looking forward to meeting PM Nawaz Sharif in Lahore today afternoon, where I will drop by on my way back to Delhi.” This unscheduled visit to Pakistan by the Indian Prime Minister had taken the world by surprise.

Trust Modi to use the golden Twitter standard of ‘140 characters’ to communicate with the millions he has at his command — sometimes with selfies attached!

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